I knew that my bus ride back down to central Chile would be long, but I didn't anticipate the two hours we would spend sitting because the highway was closed for a massive accident. Or for the fact that I was next to a heater that blasted all night. I seem to always get these seats. It happened on the busses in Vietnam a few times too. Ahhh. Always better to show up roasted, sweaty, tired and hungry in your destination city. Especially when one of the kids working on the bus (taking tickets and luggage etc) chooses to sit down next to you at 1am to ask why youre traveling alone and where your boyfriend is in the quietest, fastest mumbled spanish ever. Even better when you write down the address of your hostel wrong but know its only a couple blocks from the bus stop. And in the middle of a market. No worries, you can just wander down each street that's both a couple blocks from the bus station and in the middle of the market. That doesn't get weird looks from people with you're two backpacks.
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| They don't use these boats as much anymore for fishing, but you can take them out to get a tour of the coast! |
But I made it. And my hostel was in the middle of a massive market. So all I had to do to buy food for dinner was walk around the block. The girls in my dorm room had also come from San Pedro on an earlier (and undelayed) bus so we decided to join forces the next day to take a walking tour of the city. The tour took us around the downtown area and up into a couple of the hills above the city. Before the Panama Canal was built, Valparaiso was an incredibly important port. When it was first inhabited, sailors called it paradise. So they would say "they're going to paradise" or "van para el paradiso" and that is one explanation of why the city was called Valparaiso. Even though street art is technically illegal, Valparaiso is covered with it and has some of the most beautiful murals. The entire city stretches back onto a series of steep hills behind the port, so there are stairs and little funiculars to get up and down some of the steeper stretches. Valparaiso also had the first post office and has the longest running newspaper on the continent. Because Valparaiso is so dense and hilly with tiny streets, fires are a massive threat to the city more than many places in Chile. The fire department in Chile is totally staffed by volunteers, and they are called the Good Men.
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| A large Lutheran church. Soon after this one was finished, a Catholic church was built higher on the hill with two crosses on it. |
The city is full of colorfully painted houses and tons of corrugated tin. Apparently this started because sailors on the large ships coming around the tip of the continent would use the metal and paint to balance their ship for the bad weather. When they reached the port of Valparaiso, they would unload all this material to lighten their ships for the journey north. Though it was no longer necessary to journey around the bottom of the continent, Valparaiso is a Unesco World Heritage City, so they have kept with the traditional colors and styles.
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| View of the city while walking to Pablo Neruda's house |
After doing the walking tour, we decided to find some seafood to eat.I would up eating a baked merluza (white fish) stuffed with mushrooms. SO GOOD. We walked up through one of the hills the tour didn't take us through, and we visited one of Pablo Neruda's houses, which is now a museum. We weren't allowed to take pictures, which I was disappointed about, because he was a quirky dude with a quirky house. Apparently, he never ate meals alone, and he also believed that water tasted better if it was served in red or green glass instead of clear. He loved hosting parties and would dress up in sometimes multiple costumes in one night. The view from his living room window was absolutely stunning, and he had one specific chair he sat in to do a lot of his writing.
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| Famous piano stairs |
After wandering back down to the downtown seaside area, we decided to get a beer at a brewery that's one of the oldest in Chile. It's no PNW microbrew, but it was a pretty good amber ale that I had. For dinner we decided to get chorillana, or Chilean nachos. It's a pile of french fries with beef and onions on top. On top of that is a couple slices of cheese. Oh and one plate easily feeds three people.
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| One of my favorite murals. I wish I could remember the name of the artist. |
The next day I spent lazing around. The hostel had a kitten, I cooked myself a great lunch, and I explored the market a bit. It had some of the best looking fruit and veggies for some of the best prices I'd seen in Chile. For dinner, we had planned to go out and watch some live music, but we got distracted by cheap wine and good company. We never actually made it out of the hostel.
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| More wall art. This one was a collaboration between three of the more modern artists in Valpo. |
The next day, we drug ourselves out of bed to take a bus back over to Santiago. I had a hostel to find and an Ellen to meet so we could go wine tasting and then fly down to the south of Chile. I was actually a bit sad to leave Valparaiso. Even though its a big city, it holds quite a bit of color and charm that Santiago does not (in my opinion).
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| This guy is a photographer. But then he prints the negatives and exposes them to this cloth with a photo active paint on it. The result is an awesome picture printed on the cloth. He can use the same negative multiple times, and the end result is always unique. He let us into his studio and showed us a bunch of his work. So cool! |
